Old Deer Park, Shangarry, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Estate Features

Old Deer Park, Shangarry, Co. Tipperary

A rectangular field in County Tipperary carries a name that most passers-by would probably not register as anything out of the ordinary, yet the designation "Old Deer Park" points to a landscape with a very specific and now largely vanished purpose.

The site measures roughly 400 metres north to south and 330 metres east to west, enclosing an undulating field that slopes down towards a stream running through its centre. That gentle topography, the kind that would have provided grazing and cover in roughly equal measure, is precisely what made such enclosures useful for the managed keeping of deer.

By the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1840, the place was already being recorded as "old", suggesting the park had fallen out of active use well before that date. It was almost certainly associated with Wilford House, which lies to the south, and would have functioned as a private deer park of the sort established by landed families across Ireland from the medieval period onwards. Such parks were enclosed landscapes set aside for deer, serving both as a practical source of venison and as a marker of social standing. The surviving boundary features are fragmentary but readable: the southern edge is defined by a drystone wall, now poorly preserved and standing only about a metre high and half a metre wide, while the eastern boundary takes the form of an earthen bank. The original enclosure may have been larger, with the park possibly once extending further to the east and west beyond what can now be traced on the ground.

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Pete F
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